Secular philosophy and the religious temperament: Essays 2002–2008

Abstract

The religious temperament is a persistent human disposition to seek harmony with the universe, a requirement that secular naturalism fails to satisfy when it reduces reality to purposeless physical laws. While theism is the traditional response to this impulse, secular philosophy must address the cosmic question of existence by exploring non-reductionist alternatives, such as natural teleology, to account for the emergence of consciousness and biological complexity. In the political realm, justice is a specifically associative value that depends on the existence of a sovereign state. Because the requirements of egalitarian justice are triggered only by the collective engagement of the will within a shared, coercively imposed political framework, global socioeconomic justice remains unattainable in the absence of global sovereignty. Consequently, international obligations are limited to minimal humanitarian duties and bargaining between independent states rather than the universal application of distributive principles. Humanistic philosophical inquiry further reveals that concepts such as truth, sincerity, and the perception of others cannot be detached from their historical and phenomenological contexts. Philosophy thus functions as a distinctively humanistic discipline, resisting the totalizing claims of scientific reductionism to maintain the intelligibility of the subjective and social dimensions of human existence. – AI-generated abstract.